On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 07:17:58PM +0900, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
> > Speaking out of the experience of being part of the team translating
> > the NetBSD Website to german, I cannot agree with a loss of accuracy
> > or quality. In fact, it's rather the other way round; nearly no one
> > but a translator will realize little logical errors or bad wording
> > in a document, because most people don't read THAT thoroughly.
> 
> 	* Translating English into Japanese is totally different from
> 	  translating English into German.  Not only much more cost is
> 	  expected, but also it's hard to judge the quality of a
> 	  translation.

I don't think such a work would be only concerned with translating
NetBSD manpages to japanese only :)


> 	* Manuals must be written with more accuracy than WWW pages,
> 	  because many people (especially newbies, students, ...) read
> 	  manuals THAT thoroughly.

Yes, and someone who proofreads it as thoroughly as one does for
translating it, or proofreading the translation, will even still
increase the quality of the manpages, because you get a coverage
assertion. And it's not that newbies read man pages first, most
of the newbies I (personally) had to deal with started searching
on the NetBSD Website, because if he knew what manpage exactly
would be fitting, he wouldn't be a newbie :) Imho WWW - pages and
manpages should BOTH be written with the same accuracy ! Just
the www pages and manpages describe different things; step-by-step
instructions are more likely to stand on the web rather than in
a manpage, which typically describes things in a more abstract
way.

Oh, and if they read the manpages THAT thoroughly, I suppose
at least half of the traffic on most netbsd mailinglists which
are there for helping people wouldn't occur :)

Regards,

-Martin Weber